Experiences from a winter school on landscape agronomy: stakes, difficulties, perspectives

In the latest fifteen years, agronomic research has shown a growing interest for studies which link farm or field scale to landscape scale. Thus, agronomy is called to renew its research questions and methodologies, and as well its educational programmes. In this context, some French and Italian researchers interested in these topics, coming from different scientific fields but sharing interests on landscape scale issues in research and higher education, decided to join their efforts around a common one-week educational programme on Landscape Agronomy for undergraduate and PhD students. Their aim has been to develop a new form of knowledge transfer and application on Landscape Agronomy approaches to students of SSSA-Pisa (IT) and of the PhD School of ABIES-AgroParisTech-Paris (FR). The educational programme consisted of three phases : 1) some theoretical contributions supported by presentations on : issues regarding agriculture and farming practices at landscape level, main approaches on environmental functions of agriculture, changes in farmers practices driven by environmental questions,spatial organization of agricultural activities, role of farming in ecological dynamics, identification of complementarities among agro-environmental functions, environmental impacts of cropping systems,biodiversity influence on agro-ecosystem functions and vice-versa ; 2) two case-studies: a macro level one(at landscape scale) to analyse the role of agriculture on landscape dynamics, and a micro level one (at farm scale) to analyse farming practices and their environmental impacts ; 3) a final evaluation of the educational programme based on : contents of oral presentations on fieldwork results, global evaluation of the educational programme contents by all the participants, each individual ex-post analysis of fieldwork results. The evaluation of the students and teachers underlines benefits, requests and perspectives for education in landscape agronomy. Furthermore, this experience stimulated a collective conceptual and methodological debate that confirmed the necessity to favour and organise experience exchanges on researching and learning in landscape agronomy.